Silent Flickering RIS Aided Covert Attacks via Intermittent Cooperative Jamming

Reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) aided continuous cooperative jamming (CCJ) attack could enable jamming sources to be exposed to systems of enemies. Thus, enemies can mitigate the jamming attack by employing anti-jamming techniques. For a CCJ attack to be effective, both jamming sources and jamming signals need to be hidden from enemies. Hence, we propose to jam a hostile receiver in an intermittent cooperative jamming (ICJ) manner. Besides, we restrain the received jamming power under the detection threshold of the hostile receiver with the help of RIS. Specifically, a jammer and a RIS synchronously switch between a silent jamming mode and a non-jamming mode. We call such a RIS a silent flickering RIS (SF-RIS). To maintain the jamming effect, we maximize the bit error rate (BER) of the hostile receiver under the above requirements. We formulate and solve an optimization problem with respect to the jamming flicker rate (JFR) and the reflecting coefficients. Moreover, we verify the feasibility of the proposed scheme through extensive numerical simulations.

I. Introduction

Due to the natural vulnerability of electromagnetic (EM) waves and to ensure secure transmissions, many studies focus on exploiting physical layer security (PLS) techniques, such as cooperative jamming (CJ) [1]. Differently, considering that illegal transmissions could cause the propagation of illegal information or unauthorized occupation of wireless resources, preventing it is necessary. In the military, as adversarial communication is unexpected, self-defense jamming is crucial. In contrast to PLS, by taking advantage of the features of EM waves, we can launch jamming attacks to destroy signals received by a hostile node [2].